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18 August 2013

China & Tibet - Through Western Eyes

My first peer reviewed academic
article has just been published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China. It examines the history of a family of
writers who lived and worked in China at the turn of the last century. I’m
actually related to this family (collaterally) and I originally began my
research when I was asked to write a short piece for the British Museum Magazine quite a few years ago. It took me five
years of research to be able to write that short piece and once begun it was a subject
which had me hooked. That short article was simply the start.

One of the reasons why I originally
began this blog was to chart and record some of my academic adventures such as
this one, which has pretty much become my main project in life. I’ve been rather remiss
in this particular aspect I have to admit, so over the next couple of months
I’m hoping to post some more pieces here, detailing some of my research trips
and my reflections on the processes of historical research as I begin to move
beyond what began very simply as a personal investigation of family history
into a broader topic of historical enquiry.

Part I

So, who were these people and what
interests have they inspired in me?

Well, they were all members of the
British community which settled in China after the Opuim Wars of the
mid-nineteenth century. They were part of a vanguard of Westerners who, in
their own words, were attempting to “open up” China (and the wider world), to
expand trade into a truly global network. Western Imperial ambitions were part
and parcel of this drive towards modernisation which saw the nineteenth century
turn into a melting pot of industrialisation, commercialism, and the rise to
pre-eminence of the nation state system. Our world in essence is the result of
this era. What happened then still shapes and affects the global system which
we have inherited, and which we and subsequent generations will continue to
adapt. Exactly what the original vision of this nineteenth century project
which emanated from Europe might have been, indeed – whether or not it had been
anything so coherent in the first place, is a highly debatable issue around
which more than a fair few historians have centred their entire careers. But, as
with any era, the different forces – social, political, economic, religious,
etc – which pushed and pulled, certainly combined to drive the dynamic which,
as historians, we can now seek to pick apart and look at in detail; perhaps to
better understand how we have come to live the way that we do now. In that
sense, all history is essentially about finding out who we are. Consequently, I
am equally as fascinated by personal ‘micro-histories’ as I am by the grander
narratives of the rise and fall of certain dynasties, great battles,
revolutions, uprisings, and, treaties, etc., etc.

My current research interests began
with the family tales of two people – Louis Magrath King and Rinchen Lhamo. Two
people from two very different cultures who married long ago, in a time when
such marital unions were not necessarily “the done thing.” But to understand
who they were, as well as how and why they might have met one another, I had to
fill out a lot of background detail. He was British. She was Tibetan. They met
on the Chinese-Tibetan borderlands. But why was he there? What was happening in
that part of the world at that particular time?

Fortunately for me, they had both
written books on their life and times. But in reading these I realised I still
needed to read more widely in order to understand the bigger picture. All such
micro-histories naturally sit within a larger narrative. As I began to search
out history books on the subject so I began to shade in the details of the
time, the place, the politics, etc. Simultaneously I began to flesh out the principal
cast too. Archives, photographs, family memories began to people their world
and bring character into these lives. Staring at blank faced sepia-toned formal portraits
of unknown faces can be one of the most forbidding tasks for a
historian, but finding these people’s own words written down, hearing memories passed
down of what they’d been like, what their habits and foibles were, really helps
to bring them back to life. After a while we can begin to picture them for who
they once were – real living people; but, we have to be careful not to identify
with them too much (especially if we are related to them!), as this may bias
our understanding of who they were and what part they had played in that
broader history which we are hoping to understand. Historical research is as
much about constantly challenging your own thinking as it is about finding out
facts.

To understand why Louis King was
living in a remote village high up in the mountains of the Chinese-Tibetan
border it’s best to start with his grandparents. The Reverend Alexander
Williamson and his wife Isabelle were Scottish missionaries. They were some of
the first Westerners to travel widely in China and write about their travels.
I’ve mentioned Alex Williamson before in this blog, but to briefly re-cap – he
is now best remembered for having founded ‘the Society for the Diffusion of
Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese’, and he is also remembered
as the author of two monumental volumes of travelogue, his Journeys in North China, Manchuria, and Eastern Mongolia, with some account of Corea(1870). But, in many ways, I think his wife, Isabelle, is
perhaps more interesting (if sadly rather less well known), because Isabelle Williamson
wrote her own much slimmer and more accessible volume on a part of their
travels, in which she notes down much that is of particular interest today regarding the
lives of Chinese women whom she met and befriended. Her book, Old Highways in China(1884), is a rare window into this
aspect of past Chinese society. Happily both her book and her husband’s have
recently been republished by Cambridge University Press.

Their daughter, christened Margaret but more widely known as Veronica
King, was a well-known writer amongst the well-to-do circles of treaty port
society; and her husband, Paul Henry King, was a prominent member of the
Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Well liked by Li Hong Zhang, a highly influential statesman in the court of the Dowager Empress, Cixi – Paul King was twice decorated for his service to China: first,
by the Imperial Court with the Order of the Double Dragon, and, second, by the
Republican Government with the Order of the Golden Grain. They were married at
Holy Trinity Cathedral in Shanghai in 1881.

Paul Henry King

Order of the Double Dragon (left) & Order of the Golden Grain (right)

Li Hong Zhang

Customs House, Shanghai, 1893

Holy Trinity, Shanghai c.1890s

Louis was their fourth son, born in
China in 1886 and schooled at Chefoo and then at Berkhamsted. He joined the
British Consular Service in 1905, and began by following a fairly normal career
path, gradually climbing up the ranks of the Consular Service ladder in China –
first as a Student Interpreter at the British Legation in Peking, then
progressing through the various Assistant grades at the British Consulate in
Shanghai, and thereafter at various other treaty ports to which he was posted for varying
periods of time, until his career took a decidedly unusual turn. In 1913 he was
chosen to set up a new Consular outpost on the Chinese-Tibetan border. He was
ostensibly sent there to observe cross-border trade, yet in truth he had been
sent with secret instructions to gather and report back military intelligence;
in other words, he was a spy. The reality though isn’t so much the characteristic
kind of plotlines we’d expect from the pens of John Le Carré or Ian Fleming, as
rather more like that of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
Louis was now a small but not insignificant player on the fringes of what was
known as ‘the Great Game.’

Chefoo School, c. 1915

The British Consulate, Shanghai

The Government of British India
feared for the security of its domains – “the jewel in the crown” of the
British Empire – in particular, they were most concerned about the threat of a
Russian attack from the north, hence Tibet was increasingly an area of key
concern. After the brutal incursion of the Younghusband Expedition in 1904 there
were various attempts (both blundering and shrewd) to understand and so stabilise
political positions, to demarcate territorial boundaries and thus fix lines
drawn on maps – and so, Louis’s posting to the remote town of Tachienlu
(present day Kangding in Sichuan; also known as Dartsendo in Tibetan) was intended as a means by which the British
could keep an eye on Chinese intentions by monitoring troop movements in the
region, as the status of Tibet at the time was far from clearly understood. Yet
these lines on maps weren’t really the way Central and East Asian societies understood or
defined their regional polities – borders and boundaries were more like moveable
social entities, made up of different fealties and alliances, autonomous or
semi-autonomous principalities and tributary peoples. (See: Carole McGranahan, 'From Simla to Rongbatsa: The British and the "Modern" Boundaries of Tibet' in The Tibet Journal, Winter 2003, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, pp. 39-60). The British used to put
up wooden or stone posts along the barren windswept hilltops to mark out the
northern Indian border, but the local Tibetans when crossing these ridges no
doubt saw them as handy beams or lintels which could be better used elsewhere –
and so, knowingly or not, they used to infuriate the British officials by
removing them every time a new set were put up!

Tachienlu (Kangding), by Zhuang Xueben, 1937

China at this time though was a
highly unstable place. Civil war was raging in many parts of the country. The
Central Government only had nominal control of certain regions, such as Sichuan
and Yunnan, where in fact semi-autonomous local Generals held real sway, acting
more like minor warlords within their own domains than regional governors. In
the years before the nationalist revolution of 1911 which toppled the Manchu
Qing dynasty the ailing Imperial Chinese Army had rather remarkably made a
concerted push into Eastern Tibet, yet in the subsequent turmoil of the Republican
revolution the Tibetan Army had countered this push and regained direct control
of much of its former territory. Sporadic skirmishes were still being fought between the
Tibetan militias and Republican Chinese Army units.

A posting to this remote and
volatile region was sure to be ‘adventurous’ to say the least, and Louis
certainly had his fair share of thrills and danger – the atmosphere of which
can perhaps best be gleaned from a novel which he wrote many years later, titled The Warden of The Marches in the USA
(originally published as By Tophet Flare in the
UK). But the facts of Louis’s fascinating life are hard to piece together. They
are scattered throughout a variety of archives, in once 'secret' official papers, half
written memoirs, newspaper cuttings, brief mentions in other travellers
accounts, letters, receipts, unmarked photographs, vague and foggy family
anecdotes … To go in search of the facts of Louis’s life, and to make a proper
attempt at piecing together the events of around 100 years ago I came to
realise would – to clinch a cliché – require an adventure of my own. What had
begun as a simple suggestion: why not write an article on how a group of
Tibetan artefacts came to be a part of the British Museum’s collection and on permanent
display in the Asia Gallery there? – soon turned into something far more complex
and life consuming. Simply staring at faded and confusing photographs of far
off Tachienlu (Kangding) wasn’t enough to unlock and understand this forgotten
part of history. Books and archives can certainly offer a glimpse of times long since past, but
to locate Louis and the key episodes of his life would require walking into
those faded photographs in order to see and place him and his world – to find
the essential ‘genius loci’ as he
would have said. In 2010 I got the chance to do just that – I set out with my
camera and a new notebook full of blank empty pages in which to record my trip to Kangding …

By Tophet Flare (London:
Methuen & Co., 1937) Also published in the
USA under the title:The Warden of
the Marches: A Tale of Adventure on the Chinese Frontier of Tibet (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1938)